Saturday, November 1, 2014

Ben Rhodes: A Deal With Iran Is Healthcare for Obama

"At a moment when American negotiators say they see some signs of movement on the part of Iran toward a broad nuclear deal with the United States, the head of the United Nations nuclear inspection organization declared Friday that Iran had stopped answering the agency’s questions about suspected past efforts to design the components of a bomb."

This comes at a time when we are learning from The Washington Free Beacon in an article entitled "The Coming Détente with Iran" by Matthew Continetti that Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, declared in January:

"Bottom line is this is the best opportunity we’ve had to resolve the Iranian issue diplomatically, certainly since President Obama came to office, and probably since the beginning of the Iraq war. So no small opportunity, this is a big deal. This is probably the biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy. This is healthcare for us, just to put it in context."

"Iranian President Hassan Rouhani promised to fix the country’s tarnished human rights record when he took office last August, but Iran has since seen an alarming rise in executions. The latest death by hanging made headlines around the world when Reyhaneh Jabbari was executed for murdering former intelligence officer Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi, who had tried to rape her.

Jabbari's former lawyer accused Iran of torturing her, keeping her in solitary confinement and unfairly sentencing her to death. Mohammad Mostafaei made his accusations at a United Nations panel Thursday, just a day before Iran has to defend its human rights record at the U.N.’s annual Universal Periodic Review (UPR). When the 26-year-old woman was executed Saturday, she became the 586th person to die at the hands of the Iranian government this year.

There have been 70 more executions so far in 2014 than in the same time frame last year. During Rouhani’s first year in office, 773 people were executed, compared to 530 people during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s last year in office, according to data from the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center."

"The other day I was talking to a senior Obama administration official about the foreign leader who seems to frustrate the White House and the State Department the most. 'The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit,' this official said, referring to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, by his nickname.

. . . .

[Another senior Obama] official said the Obama administration no longer believes that Netanyahu would launch a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in order to keep the regime in Tehran from building an atomic arsenal. 'It’s too late for him to do anything. Two, three years ago, this was a possibility. But ultimately he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. It was a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it’s too late.'"

[Has anyone asked John Kerry or Ben Rhodes if they know the identity of the senior official in the Obama administration who labeled Netanyahu a "chickenshit"?]

The Obama administration is proud that it prevented Israel from destroying Iran's nuclear weapons development facilities, while at the same time launching a demeaning attack against Israel's prime minister? Of course, Obama is now in his second and final term of office, and today there are "no holds barred" when it comes to undermining Israel. Anyone without blinders should have seen this coming.